Capturing Light

Photograph by Anna Rok

Though tired and worn from the past two weeks of the program, each fellow’s face lit up as soon as we entered into Mierz Wysoko (Aim High)’s office on Brzeska Street.  “We work with children here, that’s why it looks so interesting and weird,” Magda Szeniawska, the founder of Aim High, and our speaker today, informed us.  The walls here are covered with brightly colored graffiti, art, posters, stickers, and more, accumulated over the last seven years.  In the center of the room is a rope swing hanging from an overhead beam, and next to it, a metal shopping cart, with wheels and all, that had its front cut off and pillows added to make a comfy and cool rolling chair.  Throughout the room was a smorgasbord of old couches and chairs from different decades, worn from years of use.  Overall, the place had the feel of a high schooler’s personal lair in their parent’s basement; it’s exactly where I would want to be if I were still fourteen.

Aim High, founded in 2005 by a handful of university students and young activists who were interested in mentoring and helping so-called “street children” in the Praga district of Warsaw, has made this place it’s own.  However, Aim High staffers and volunteers have not made this a place for the organization and its staff, but have allowed the youth who utilize this room to re-appropriate this space for themselves.  This is one thing that sets Aim High apart from other youth organizations: here, the youth are mostly in charge.

Photograph by Allen Sanchez

While Magda Szeniawska acknowledged the idyllic and often impractical standard of democratic empowerment for rambunctious and typically “out-of-control” youth, she did tell us, and show us, how it has been working for the past seven years.

Brzeska is a notorious street in Warsaw.  Years ago the government moved criminals, alcoholics, and other ‘problematic’ citizens from the other side of the River to this area, which has since maintained a reputation as being dangerous, impoverished, and undesirable.  It is here where Aim High chose to set up shop and work with “children of the streets.”  For our purpose, “street children” describes youth who often come from a dysfunctional home and in turn spend the majority of their days on the streets.  They have a place to call home, but it may be lacking many of the integral parts of a home: stability, concerned parents, safety, and guidance.

The interesting thing about Aim High is that it does not seek to replace the home or even some of the structural aspects that one may associate with a typical home.  There are no strict rules, few “dos and don’ts,” and no adult figures that are going to scold or lecture you.  What Aim High does is provide a safe space, support, friendly relationships, mentoring, a sense of worth, and guidance for youth who may not have such a foundation in their home or neighborhood.  It is flexible, loosely structured, and youth driven.  It flies in the face of everything we associate with formalized school or home structures, and for this, I am drawn to it.

Photograph by Allen Sanchez

As a high school history teacher, I often-times ask myself, “Why am I teaching this material to these students? When is this ever going to help them in life?”  While I do believe that learning about history can help students in many areas of life, I know that many students hate the thought of history class.  Many students do well in some areas but not in others, and some may learn better by reading instead of by listening.  There are multiple intelligences and ways of learning, and a plethora of student interests.  Unfortunately, traditional schooling caters to only a few ways of learning and covers only a very tiny fraction of academic, occupational, artistic, or other student interests.  Because of this, I believe that the traditional model of education needs to be scrapped in favor of a more innovative, flexible, and student-driven model.

For too long, traditional educational models around the world have forced each and every youth into a model of learning, thinking and doing which is unsuitable for the vast majority of people.  Aim High has broken from this traditional model and opened up its doors for students who “failed” to do well in this confining and paralyzing state-sanctioned model of learning and doing.

At Aim High, the youth choose what they want to do and learn about.  Interested in horses?  Learn how to make a film-report on the animal, present the project to get funding from sponsors, and take your group on a horseback riding trip.  Want to learn about other cultures?  Find traditional costumes, learn about them, and have fun taking pictures of your friends wearing them.  Want a bike? Learn how to weld and build one from local scrap metal.  Want to learn about photography? Make a camera obscura and capture light.

Photography by Anna Rok

This model, of course, is far from flawless.  Students who continue on only this informal path of learning will still fall out of the state-recognized model.  Kids here still fight, swear, spit, and steal.  The difference here though, is that children--not curriculum, standards, or some arcane model of education--are the center of attention.  They are the focus of the program, which seeks, at its core, to instill a sense of worth as well as a sense of values.  When the children aren’t doing well, the model is adapted and re-modeled to work better.  When children stray from the basic rules that are upheld here, they are not kicked out and sent to a “detention center,” as public schools would do, but are counseled into understanding their mistakes and are given options to return to the program.

Photography by Allen Sanchez

It is sad how the most vulnerable group of people in our society is often the first group to be barred from participating in a normal life.  So many of the stories we heard today, and so many of the stories we have encountered in our own lives, are those of young, promising youth who have been denied an equal opportunity at success because their own strengths and interests did not fit into society’s narrow and arbitrary “path for success.”  If the state and its system gave each of these youth a fair opportunity that utilized the child’s own strengths, I have no doubt that the majority of these kids would seize the opportunity and excel.  

- Allen Sanchez (US Fellow)